Encyclopedia of

Shakespeare, William

For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, death— which modern society
has sanitized and rendered largely invisible—was a brutally
conspicuous presence. Early modern London, whose gates were decorated with
the boiled heads of traitors and criminals, was a place in which public
executions formed a regular staple of entertainment, where the corpses of
condemned persons were available for public dissection, and where the
fragility of life was repeatedly brought home by devastating epidemics of
plague that swept away tens of thousands of citizens at a stroke.
Magnificent pageantry might adorn the funeral processions of royalty and
nobles; but every church in the kingdom contained a charnel house whose
stench of putrefaction acted as a constant reminder of the grim facts of
mortality. Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that the
drama of the period should be much possessed by death and preoccupied by
the struggle to tame its apocalyptic menace.

"Death," Hamlet declares in the most famous of all his
soliloquies, "is a
consummation
/ Devoutly to be wished" (Hamlet, 3.1.62). He seeks to persuade
himself that dying is no mere ending, but marks the fulfilment and
perfection of mortal life. Behind his words lie centuries of consolatory
writing, from the classical philosophy of the Stoics, for whom the
encounter with death was the ultimate proving ground of wisdom and
virtuous living, to the Christian
ars moriendi,
with its merciful translation to a better state. The prospect of
mortality is seldom so reassuring for Shakespeare's characters,
however; more typical than the calm resolve of Hamlet's final
moments is the panorama of decay in the graveyard, with its parade of
identically grinning skulls and the parables of levelling indifference
they excite in the Prince's imagination: "Why may not
imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till 'a find it
stopping a bunghole?" (5.1.202–3).

In
Measure for Measure
it is the gross material realities of death, as much as its metaphysical
uncertainties, that inspire Claudio's terror as he awaits
execution:

Aye, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod. . . .
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling —'tis too horrible!
(
Measure for Measure,
3.1.117–27)

This is what it means to be, like Cordelia in Lear's despairing
phrase, "dead as earth" (
King Lear,
5.6.262). Claudio's apparent imperviousness to the salvific
promises of religion, and his existential vertigo at the prospect of
annihilation, give his speech a distinctly modern feel; but underlying his
horror, as it underlies the sardonic humor of Hamlet and the gravediggers,
is a historically specific anxiety about the social menace of death, its
arbitrary cancellation of the entire system of differences on which the
profoundly hierarchical order of Renaissance society depended; for the
dead in Claudio's vision are consigned to an utterly chaotic
condition, as "lawless and incertain" as the restless
imaginings it inspires.

Such anxieties are traceable everywhere in early modern culture. They are
especially apparent in iconic representations of universal mortality, like
the Dance of Death, whose grinning cadavers sweep off representatives of
every rank to their common end; or the Triumph of Death, in which the
corpses of monarch and peasant, merchant and pauper lie promiscuously
heaped together beneath the chariot wheels of King Death. But they also
motivated the lavish pomp of heraldic obsequies and the increasingly
worldly extravagance of the memorials crowding the aisles of parish
churches and cathedrals. "Never," marveled Francis Bacon,
"was the like number of beautiful and costly tombs and monuments
erected in sundry churches in honourable memory of the dead" (Bacon
1861, p. 158).

If this fantastic elaboration of funeral art can be explained as a defiant
reaction to the leveling assaults of death—especially in the
recurrent epidemics of plague whose cartloads of corpses were stripped of
all individual dignity—it also offered a secular answer to a crisis
in the management of mourning created by the Protestant denial of
Purgatory. The consequent abolition of the vast medieval industry of
intercession deprived the living of any power to assist the dead. Haunted
like Hamlet by the Ghost's importunate "Remember me!"
(
Hamlet,
1.5.91), the bereaved had now to
rely on the ambiguous consolations of memory and art—hence
Hamlet's distress at the scanted mourning rituals allowed his
father, or Laertes' rage at Ophelia's "maimed
rites," and his bitter resentment of the "obscure
funeral" and "hugger mugger" burial of Polonius,
"No trophy, sword, or hatchment o'er his bones"
(5.1.219; 4.5.84, 214–215); hence, too, Hamlet's dying
insistence on the need for Horatio to remain behind, as a kind of
"living monument" to "tell my story" (5.1.297;
5.2.349). The ending of
Hamlet,
with its self-conscious wordplay on "stage" and
"audience" (5.2.378, 387, 396), itself constitutes an
elaborate demonstration of the power of dramatic story and theatrical art
to overcome the power of death.

The rivalry of art and death is, of course, a recurrent theme in the
literature of the period—never more powerfully treated than in
Shakespeare's Sonnets. At the heart of the sequence is a group of
powerful lyrics in which the poet, performing his superb variations on a
well-known trope from the Roman poet Horace ("
exegi monumentum aere perennius,
"
Carmina,
3.30), sets the monumental claims of poetry against the ravages of Death
and his thieving ally, Time. Death is a leveling "churl"
(Sonnet 32) or "wretch" (Sonnet 74) who renders his victims
"base" (Sonnet 74) by consigning them to anonymous
"dust" (Sonnet 32) and the degrading ministrations of
"vilest worms" (Sonnet 71); while his "mortal
rage" (Sonnet 64) reduces even the loftiest memorials to
"unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time" (Sonnet
55). Yet Shakespeare insists that his own "powerful rhyme,"
by its capacity to outlast death, can confer the immortality to which
"the gilded monuments / Of princes" vainly aspire (Sonnet
55). It is this that enables the poet, despite his humble status, to
assert a kind of parity with the beloved patron to whom his lyrics are
addressed. The poet's mortal remains, consigned to the indifference
of a common grave, may be "too base" to be remembered by his
aristocratic "friend"; yet he can claim both immortality and
a kind of equality by virtue of the "gentle verse" that
memorializes his beloved's fame (Sonnets 74, 81).

The Sonnets create a kind of stage on which "the eyes of all
posterity" can witness the spectacle of the patron's fame:
"'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity / Shall you pace
forth" (55); and the touch of swagger in "pace"
recalls the postures of heroic self-assertion with which so many
protagonists of Renaissance tragedy confront their deaths. So Macbeth,
defying the chaotic "wrack" of the apocalyptic storm that he
himself has invoked, prepares to die "with harness on [his]
back" (
Macbeth,
5.5.50–51); or Othello reasserts his martial Venetian identity by
transforming his suicide into a re-enacted triumph over the Turkish enemy;
or Coriolanus calls on the Volscian mob to "cut me to
pieces" with an insolent reminder of his conquest of Corioles
("Alone I did it. 'Boy'!" (
Coriolanus,
5.6.115).

But even in the bleak world of King Lear, where the force of
undifferentiation is so overwhelmingly felt as to allow no room for such
egotistic self-assertion ("Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have
life, / And thou no breath at all?" 5.3.307–308), theatrical
convention nevertheless contrives to impose a consolatory show of order
upon the final panorama of desolation: The concluding stage direction,
"Exeunt with a dead march," is a reminder of the extent to
which Renaissance tragedy with its "industrious scenes and acts of
death" (
King John,
2.1.376) self-consciously mimicked the arts of funeral. The dressing of
the tragic stage in black hangings, like those that adorned both churches
and great houses in time of funeral; the use of black costumes; the
display of hearses, tombs, and monuments as stage properties; and the
convention of ending the play with a funeral procession—all these
served as reminders that tragedy was conceived above all as the drama of
death. But because the obsequies of the great, organized with lavish
attention to the prerogatives of rank by the College of Heralds, were
imagined (like coronations and royal progresses) as a species of
"triumph," the incorporation of funeral pomps in tragedy
also symbolized the power of art to challenge the universal monarchy of
death.

The tragic catastrophe enacted the human confrontation with death's
arbitrary cancellation of meaning; and through its displays of agony,
despair, and ferocious self-assertion, early modern audiences were
encouraged to rehearse vicariously their own encounter with death. Thus
tragedy served, in a fashion that was inseparable alike from its didactic
pretensions and its entertaining practice, both as an instrument for
probing the painful mystery of ending and as a vehicle of resistance to
the leveling assaults of death; for even as it paraded the emblems of
undifferentiation, tragedy offered to contain the fear of mortality by
staging

In the popular film adaptation of William Shakepeare's Romeo and
Juliet (1968), directed by Franco Zeffirelli, Juliet kills herself
with Romeo's dagger when she discovers that he killed himself after
he thought she drank the fatal poison.

CORBIS (BELLEVUE)

fantasies of ending in which the moment of dying was transformed by the
arts of performance into a supreme demonstration of distinction. That is
why Cleopatra carefully stages her death in a royal monument. Claiming her
suicide as that which "shackles accidents and bolts up
change" (
Antony and Cleopatra,
5.2.6) through her double metamorphosis into spiritualized "fire
and air" and eternizing "marble" (
Antony and Cleopatra,
5.2.240, 289), the queen's language makes an exceptionally
powerful connection between the bravura of her own performance and the
dramatist's triumphant art.

Almost every tragedy of the period ends in a funeral procession of some
kind, and this conventional expectation allowed playwrights to create
striking theatrical effects by displacing the pageantry of death into
other parts of the dramatic structure. Thus the national discord, which is
the subject of
Henry VI,
is signaled as much by the disconcertingly abrupt obsequies of Henry V
that open its action, as by the unpromising royal betrothal (a parody of
comic ending) with which it concludes; while in
Titus Andronicus
the process of political and social disintegration is measured by the gap
between the pompous interment of Titus's sons in the first act and
the grotesque mock funeral of Tamora's sons, their heads encased in
pastry "coffins," in Act 5.

Even more striking disruptions of convention could be achieved by
transposing episodes of
death and funeral into comedy—like the soberfaced travesty of
burial rites which the repentant Claudio must perform at Hero's
family monument in
Much Ado About Nothing,
or the mock deaths on which the plots of late romances like
Pericles, Cymbeline,
and
The Winter's Tale
depend. While the menace of death is always restrained by the expectation
of a happy ending, such details are sufficient to remind the audience that
the domains of folly and mortality are never quite as far apart as the
symmetrically opposed masks of tragedy and comedy might at first suggest.

At one level, indeed, comedy—as the critic Marjorie Garber and
others have shown—is deeply preoccupied with mortality, its action
involving a symbolic expulsion of death from the stage world. But this
comic victory is a fragile one, always vulnerable to some crack in the
veneer of comic artifice. The concluding nuptials of
Love's Labours Lost
(a play that begins with a meditation on "brazen tombs" and
the "disgrace of death") are suddenly arrested by the
entrance of Marcade, like a blackclad summoner from the Dance of Death;
Falstaff's parade of comic immortality never recovers from the
moment when his mistress, Doll, "speaks like a death's
head" (
Henry the Fourth, Part 2,
2.4.31); and even
A Midsummer Night's Dream
follows the ludicrous mock deaths of Pyramus and Thisbe with the sinister
frisson of Puck's chanting—"[Now] the screech-owl,
screeching loud / Puts the wretch that lies in woe / In remembrance of a
shroud" (5.1.376–378)—before Oberon and Titania
reappear to summon the fairy dance of exorcism and blessing in which the
play ends.

The latest of all Shakespeare's comic performances, the tragicomic
Two Noble Kinsmen,
written with John Fletcher, seems to concede the ultimate impotence of
the comic triumph over death, ending as it does with a melancholy prospect
of wedding overhung by funeral: "Journey's end in lovers
meeting," Feste the clown had sung in
Twelfth Night
(2.3.43); but the lovers' reunion that resolves the accidents of
plot in this final play only fulfills the prophecy of the mourning Queens
in the "funeral solemnity" that concluded Act I:
"This world's a city full of straying streets, / And
death's the market-place where each one meets"
(2.1.15–16).